The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave

by Bill Pronzini

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  Copyright Page

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  For Marcia

  ONE

  PEACEFUL BEND IS a peaceful town, Peaceful Valley a peaceful place.

  Now I know a lot of folks say that about where they hang their hats, some with more justification than others. It’s a matter of civic pride fashioned of a sense of security and neighborly goodwill. That’s the way it is in Peaceful Bend, the largest town and county seat, and all through the valley. Ranchers, farmers, merchants, businessmen all living peaceably together in as pretty a section of northwestern Montana as you could ask for, the town tucked into a crook in a fork of the Flathead River, the valley surrounded wide on three sides by timbered mountains.

  It wasn’t always peaceful here, of course. Way back before the century turned, when I first pinned on a badge as a young green deputy, we had our share of trouble the same as any other small settlement—renegade Indians, outlaws, rustlers, the general run of riffraff that follow the railroads, lumberjacks on a spree, and the usual land and water rights feuds between cattlemen and farmers. Took a sharp eye, a strong will, an iron fist, and now and then both ends of a Colt six-gun to tame things down. The natural flow of progress—changing attitudes, modern inventions, new laws—rounded off the rest of the rough edges.

  By the time I was elected to my first term as sheriff in 1896, both the town and the county were living up to their names right proper. I don’t mind saying I’ve had a fair hand in making and keeping it that way, the voters having kept me in office for two decades now. You won’t find many citizens who’ll take the name of Lucas Monk in vain. Not bragging on myself, just stating a fact.

  The state has changed considerable in those two decades. More and more crisscrossing rail lines connecting it with the rest of the country. A large population growth, some fifteen million immigrants since 1900 come to work on the railroads and in the mines, smelters, and lumber camps. A homestead boom thanks to legislative acts that opened up sections in national forests and Indian tribal lands. More and more motorcars mixing in with the horse-drawn conveyances, the countryside and city streets filling up with telephone poles and hydroelectric power lines. Even flying machine exhibitions at the Fort Missoula baseball park.

  Reform movements aplenty, too. Labor unions, one of ’em the radical bunch known as the Wobblies that caused so much trouble in Butte the governor had to call in machine gun–toting National Guard troops to curb the violence, another the Nonpartisan League made up of farmers that didn’t like big business and didn’t support either of the political parties. Women were on the cusp of being given the vote, and about time, too—the main reason being a Missoula suffragist named Jeannette Rankin, who held rallies and meetings all over the state, including one in Peaceful Bend that drew more folks than any other event ever had, and raised enough support to convince the politicians in Helena to allow her to address the legislature. There was even talk of running her for a congressional seat on the Republican ticket come the 1916 election, which if they did and she won, would make her the first woman ever elected to Congress.

  These changes affected Peaceful Bend, naturally, but not as much as they did the larger towns. Northwestern Montana is less populated than the rest of the state, our entire county having only about 1,700 souls according to the most recent census, and while Peaceful Valley isn’t what you’d call isolated—Missoula, Kalispell, Helena are only a few hours away by train—we’re still a small rural county with most of the land in long-held hands. Folks hereabouts tend to cling to some of the old ways of thinking and doing things.

  The revolution down in Mexico and the war that had flared up in Europe a few months back had tongues wagging, but those hostilities were too far off and the particulars too mystifying for most citizens to dwell on. Seemed like America would stay well shut of the one overseas, a good thing for the country in general and Peaceful Valley for certain. We had enough concerns of our own to occupy our thinking.

  What I’ve been leading up to is this: There’s been hardly any crime in my bailiwick the past dozen years or so. The last lethal shooting in Elk County was way back in ’07, when a wheat farmer named Lamont made the mistake of ventilating a neighbor he claimed made improper advances to his wife. The worst offenses my deputies—Carse Wheeler, Boone Hudson, Ed Flanders—and I have had to deal with since are a few minor steer and sheep rustlings, chicken thievery, kids’ vandalism, and an occasional drunken brawl Peaceful Bend’s town marshal, Sam Prine, couldn’t handle by himself. If I have to act in my official capacity more than a couple days a month, it’s unusual enough to invite comment.

  Anyhow, that was the way it was until mid-October, 1914.

  Then, all of a sudden, I had a weeklong crime wave to deal with.

  No rhyme or reason to any of what happened, no advance warning signs and only two of the offenses connected. It was as though a temporary blight had descended on Peaceful Valley, and that’s no exaggeration. Crimes large and small, new mixed with old, from near comical to downright ugly that flustered and frustrated me, had me doubting myself more than once, and nearly cost me my life.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Best I tell it as it happened, beginning with the Indian trouble. Not the kind you might think—Indian trouble like none other in the history of our sovereign state.

  * * *

  THE CLIMATE IN Peaceful Valley is fairly mild, considering how far north we are—the mountain ranges tend to protect us from the worst of the howling winds—but winter comes early and stays long. Fall is pretty much done with by mid-October, the red and gold and tawny seasonal colors fading, the aspens and willows and sycamores already starting to drop their leaves. The first heavy frost, which we’d had two days ago, turns the mornings sharp cold and generally means we’ll be seeing snow before long. Thin skins of ice form in shadowy places even when the sun’s out, so you have to watch careful where you step. I never minded winter when I was younger, but now that I’m on the cusp of the half-century mark, the cold gets into my bones and such chores as shoveling snow aren’t near as easy as they once were.

  I’d just come into the sheriff’s office on this Friday morning and was about to start a fire in the woodstove when Henry Bandelier burst in. The courthouse has an oil furnace in the basement, but my office and the jail are at the back end and the furnace doesn’t put out enough heat to suit me once the temperature starts dropping. So I’d convinced the county commissioners to have the old Vogelzang potbelly installed to warm me and my deputies, and such prisoners as we might have in the lockup, through the winter months.

  Bandelier, who owns the tobacco shop on Main Street, is the excitable sort, and this morning he was in a real dithe
r. So flappable, in fact, with his feet dancing and his arms sawing up and down, he put me in mind of a pint-sized, red-faced albino magpie about to take flight.

  “Sheriff, I been robbed!”

  That brought me to attention. I didn’t much care for Bandelier—he was a loudmouthed, opinionated little booger, and no more honest than he had to be—and the feeling was mutual. He’d backed my opponent in the last two elections and made critical remarks in public about me and my methods. But you don’t have to care for a man to do your duty by him.

  “The hell you say. When did it happen?”

  “Middle of the night,” he said.

  “How much is missing?”

  “How much? All of it, of course!”

  “All the money in your cashbox?”

  “Money? Who said anything about money?”

  “Well, you did … didn’t you?”

  “No! Wasn’t money that was stolen. It was my Indian.”

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me, Sheriff. My prize wooden Indian’s been pilfered.”

  “Now who in tarnation would steal that monstros—” I stopped, hawked my throat clear, and started over. “That Indian’s been setting in front of your store six or seven years now. Weighs a hundred and fifty pounds if it weighs an ounce. Who’d want to steal it?”

  “Tom Black Wolf, that’s who.”

  “Oh, now…”

  “It’s a plain damn fact,” Bandelier said. “Him and that friend of his, Charlie Walks Far. The two of ’em stole my Indian in the dead of night, and there’s no getting around it.”

  “How do you know it was them?”

  “Lloyd Cooper told me so, that’s how I know. He was awake at three a.m., got out of bed to use his chamber pot. He heard a wagon rattling fast by the hotel and looked out, and Black Wolf was driving with Walks Far sitting beside him.”

  “How could Lloyd tell at a distance?”

  “There was a moon last night,” Bandelier said. “You know that as well as I do. A fat harvest moon. Lloyd saw them plain.”

  “Saw the wooden Indian, too?”

  “Saw something eight feet long in the wagon bed, under canvas. Said it had the shape of a body. Ain’t anything eight feet long that looks like a covered-up corpse, by God, except my Indian.”

  That was open to debate, but trying to talk sensible to a fractious individual like Henry Bandelier was akin to trying to convince a mean-spirited bull in rutting season not to be in such an all-fired hurry. I said, “Either Tom or Charlie have cause to be riled at you?”

  “No. I haven’t set eyes on either of ’em in two weeks or more.”

  “Trouble the last time you did?”

  Bandelier snap-wagged his head. “They must’ve done it out of pure devilment.”

  “Devilment? They’re not that kind, especially not Tom Black Wolf.”

  “You can’t keep on sticking up for that young buck. Not after this, you can’t.”

  “All right, just hold your water. I’ll drive out to the reservation and have a talk with Tom.”

  “Talk with him, hell. You arrest him, you hear me? Arrest him and bring back my Indian, or else—”

  “Or else what?”

  He sputtered some, said lamely, “Just do your duty, Sheriff!” and turned on his heel and stalked out.

  I stood for a time nibbling on a droop of my mustache and puzzling before I left the office. In my opinion the front of Bandelier’s store would look a whole lot better without that wooden Indian rearing up next to the entrance, and most folks in Peaceful Bend would agree. There’d been more than one complaint about the danged thing, all of which Bandelier ignored. He was right paternal about it, which was ironical because he didn’t like real Indians at all. He’d trade with the ones on the reservation, but he made them come around to the rear of his shop so as not to “offend” his white customers.

  He claimed the wooden Indian had been a gift from the Cuba Libre Cigar Company of Cleveland, Ohio, in honor of the fact that he sold more Cuba Libre crooks and panatelas than any other merchant in the state, a suspect claim if ever there was one. More likely, he’d made some kind of deal with the Cuba Libre people to display the Indian, which had their name written across the chest in bold red letters, in exchange for a discount. Either way, it was an eyesore. And not just on account of its size. It had been rough-carved of some tobacco-spit brown wood, the limbs and head were some out of proportion to the body, a piece of the nose had been shot off by a drunken cowhand one Fourth of July, and the handful of cigars it was clutching were so big and phallic-looking they’d caused more than one woman to blush and look away when Bandelier first unveiled it.

  Officially now, though, that wooden Indian might’ve been the Mona Lisa. For it was stolen property, its theft a felony offense. The law’s the law, and I’m sworn to uphold it. But it sure would pain me to have to arrest Tom Black Wolf and Charlie Walks Far for the crime, if in fact they were guilty.

  And if they were, what was their reason for it? That was the question uppermost in my mind, even if it wasn’t uppermost in Henry Bandelier’s.

  What would a couple of decent live Indians want with an eight-foot, hundred and fifty pound, butt-ugly wooden Indian?

  TWO

  THE MODEL T wouldn’t start without I spent ten minutes at the crank, aggravating my bursitis with every turn. Contraption never failed to give me and Carse trouble as soon as the weather turned frosty. The drive bands tended to fall out of adjustment, which caused the dang thing to creep forward so that you had to dodge out of the way while you were cranking to keep from getting run over. Clutch was prone to slipping, too.

  Come the winter snows, the machine was even more of a chore. When the temperature dropped enough degrees below zero, like as not you’d need two men to get the motor going—one to put a blowtorch to the manifold after first blocking up the rear wheel and then to crank until his arm pretty near fell off, the other to sit inside and jiggle the spark and gas levers to keep the engine running once it got started. Then chains had to be put on the tires before you could drive out. And you had to bundle up in a lap robe as well as winter clothing to keep from freezing to death.

  Progress is all well and good, and with 1915 just around the corner a county sheriff’s got to have a modern conveyance or folks don’t think he’s serious about his job, but if you ask me, a good horse is a better asset to a man than any motorcar ever manufactured. Horses don’t freeze up in the winter, and you don’t have to chain their hooves so they don’t slip and slide and hurl you into a snowbank or down into a ditch.

  I pedaled the flivver into low gear and drove on down Main Street, the exhaust farting smoke and sparks all the way, and on out the northeast road. I paid close attention to my driving, as you’d better do if you wanted to get somewhere in one piece, but I did some ruminating, too, mostly about Tom Black Wolf.

  He was twenty-two, smart as a whip, and from all indications down deep honest. Seemed to me you could trust him with your money and likely your life, which is a hell of a lot more than I’d say for a good number of white men in Peaceful Valley, Henry Bandelier being one of them. Tom had whizzed through agency school, and at the urging of Abe Fetters, the Indian agent, and Doc Olsen and me and a couple of others, he’d come in to attend high school in Peaceful Bend. Graduated at the top of his class, too.

  He wanted to be an agronomist. I had to ask what that meant, first time I heard it. It means somebody who specializes in field-crop production and soil management, which is to say somebody who can make crops grow on poor land. He’d applied to a university up in Canada and been accepted and would have enrolled last semester—he’d been working jobs on and off the reservation to save up enough for his tuition—but for his grandfather, old Chief Victor, who was descended from great warrior chiefs and had been one himself during the middle of the last century. Tom just wouldn’t leave the reservation while the old man was on his deathbed. Well, Chief Victor had been on his deathbed three months now and mig
ht be there another three before he finally let go. Those old warriors die reluctant.

  So that was Tom Black Wolf. And Charlie Walks Far was all right, too. Not as bright as Tom, but a hard worker and no trouble to anybody. It just didn’t make sense that those two, of all the people in the county, red or white or otherwise, would have swiped Bandelier’s cigar company Indian. Not even as a prank. They were too law-abiding and sober-sided for that sort of foolishness.

  It was fourteen miles out to the reservation, along a road that had been built for horses and wagons, not Model T Fords and their like. The flivver was contrary at the best of times; on such a road as this it kept bucking and lurching, as if it didn’t much like company or my hands on its steering wheel. By the time I drove onto reservation land, my backside was sorer than if I’d been sitting a saddle for the same length of time and distance.

  The reservation was mostly poor land, rocky and hilly, with not much decent bottomland. Little wonder Tom Black Wolf wanted to be an agronomist; you’d have to have special knowledge, and maybe divine help, to grow worthwhile crops in soil like this. That was the federal government for you: force Indians to live on such land and then expect them to bow down and lick your boots in gratitude. It was a hell of a thing to be born with a skin color different than the men who run the country, particularly when the country had belonged to you in the first place.

  Close to three hundred Indians lived here. Mostly Salish, or Flatheads as they were called on account of the false notion started by white men that they had a tribal ritual of flattening their babies’ heads, and a smattering of Kootenais, Pend d’Orielles, Piegans, mixed bloods, and breeds. Their homes were mostly slab-built shacks put up by the government back in the eighties, scattered around a small, shallow, silt-brown lagoon. There were some ramshackle barns and livestock pens—the Indians ran sheep, goats, and a few head of cattle—and an agency store and an infirmary where the poorly trained reservation doctor treated ills and disease with such medicines as the Bureau of Indian Affairs doled out. Tweaked my conscience every time I came out here, even though I’d had nothing to do with building the place or running it. It was squalor, plain and simple, two generations’ worth, and no man worth his salt faces squalor with a clear conscience.